Federal Employment & Immigration Services
The industry — Federal labour, employment and immigration services
Base industry report for 9113 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 30
- Under 10 employeesA
- 50%
Of 30 Canadian establishments with employees, 50% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 5
The binding constraint — entry cost + regulatory drag
Employment and Social Development Canada's service delivery and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada: 30 establishments, 11 of them employing a hundred or more [A]. Two departments, in other words. This is a buyer, not a market to enter: the activity is a function of government, carried out under statute by public servants, and no licence, acquisition or amount of capital lets a private entrant perform it. The adjacent private markets are real and sit outside this code — regulated immigration consultants and lawyers (5411), settlement agencies funded by contribution agreements (6241), and employment-services contractors (5613). Selling technology to the departments themselves means competing for a small number of very large, multi-year transformation contracts that go to global integrators. The cut factor is recorded as entry cost and regulatory drag because that is the nearest the screening model comes to 'not available to private parties' — the barrier is not high, it is absolute, and everything interesting is in what gets sold across it.
The relevant geography is that of the buyer: one federal department's national procurement. A supplier competes for that buyer's contracts under that buyer's rules, and a win in one jurisdiction does not carry to the next without a fresh qualification.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 4 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| CGITSX: GIB.AA | not disclosed | — | FY2025 revenue $15,912.7M, Canada segment $2,090.7M, bookings $17.57B at 110.4% book-to-bill. Revenue is not scored as this market's floor — none of it is broken out as Canadian federal work, and treating the total as this market's size would be exactly the error this research warns about. |
| MaximusNYSE: MMSA | not disclosed | — | FY2025 revenue $5.43B, with an Outside the U.S. segment of $599.9M, down 8.7%. The segment is company-wide non-US and Maximus does not break out Canada inside it, so it sizes the outsourced-programme business generally and not this buyer. |
| IBM Canada / Accenture / DeloitteC | not disclosed | — | The rest of the transformation bench. Not researched for this record; named because departmental delivery history, not price, is what decides these awards. |
| Professional-services and temporary-help suppliersUNVERIFIED | not disclosed | — | The tier an entrant can actually reach: staffing these programmes by the day through federal supply arrangements, at rates set by the arrangement rather than negotiated. A business, but a labour-arbitrage one — and the reason this record cuts rather than encourages. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. The establishment count and its size bands are Statistics Canada, December 2023 [A]. The trade-agreement thresholds are read from Treasury Board Contracting Policy Notice 2025-8 [A], which covers federal entities only. The competitive field was researched for this pass. CGI's fiscal 2025 figures come from its own results release and the fiscal 2025 fourth-quarter MD&A filed on SEDAR and with the SEC [A]: revenue $15,912.7M, bookings $17.57B, Canada segment $2,090.7M. One thing was checked and not used — a secondary source gave a 38% government share of CGI's revenue; neither the results release nor the MD&A states any breakdown by client vertical, so the figure is left off the record. Maximus's fiscal 2025 total and its three segment revenues are read from its own fourth-quarter release [A]; the Outside the U.S. segment is company-wide non-US and Canada is not broken out within it, which is stated in the competitor note rather than glossed. No vendor's revenue is treated as this market's floor: none of these disclosures measures Canadian federal spending, and no series that does was found. Nothing was sourced for the activity itself, because it is not sold: the characterisation of what the count measures, and of how incumbency works inside those rules, is analyst judgment — UNVERIFIED. No US figure is attached because County Business Patterns excludes public administration. The 9111 and 912110 software records carry the rest of the sourced material on selling to government, and the 9111 record is built on the US certification regime rather than the Canadian one.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
PSAC component for ESDC/Service Canada and IRCC staff; the union of the people who actually run these two departments.
Association of licensed immigration consultants; continuing-education seminars and the National Citizenship and Immigration Conference.
Membership body of immigration lawyers, academics and students; research and submissions on IRCC policy.
Coalition of settlement and refugee-serving organisations; the main civil-society counterpart to IRCC, active through September 2026.
Career development charity; runs Canada's Career Development Conference (Cannexus), where employment services practitioners meet.
Daily Canadian immigration news site covering IRCC programs and policy changes.
cccd.ca is the Canadian Center for Cultural Diplomacy, not a career development body, and was not used; the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants site blocks automated access and is a regulator rather than a community.